Day 127

20/07/2020 Monday, Cloudy

Special Report: Into the fog - How Britain lost track of the coronavirus

As Reuters has reported previously, Britain was slow to impose lockdown measures. That delay was costly. Professor Neil Ferguson, a disease modelling expert from Imperial College, London, has said that introducing lockdown measures a week earlier “would have reduced the final death toll by at least half.”

Now, a Reuters investigation reveals further missteps and failures by officials and government agencies, including Selbie’s Public Health England, in testing, tracking and tracing. Among decisions that doctors and epidemiologists say cost lives were:

• Failure to build up capacity to perform mass tests for COVID-19.

• Deciding on a narrower definition of COVID-19 than used by the World Health Organization and other countries.

• A decision to abandon testing of most people who didn’t require hospitalization, and failure, early on, to create any way to track infection.

• A decision to abandon a programme of widespread “contact tracing,” in which people in contact with an infected person were traced and told to isolate to stop the outbreak spreading.

• Deciding to share almost no details about the location of infections with local public health officials or the public.

• Fragmenting local responsibility for public health.

“Every mistake that was made did, unfortunately, cost lives,” said Professor Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King’s College London.